STOP NITPICKING A GENIUS

By FRANK CONROY;

Published: June 25, 1995

The Studio, Part I

IN THE OLD MASONIC HALL BEING USED AS A RECORDING STUDIO, WYNTON Marsalis tells the band to take a 10-minute break, steps down from the podium, comes over and gives me a hug. We sit down in the old theater seats.

"Man," he says, "I am tired of all this stuff they're writing about me. It has nothing to do with music."

"The dogs bark, but the caravan rolls on," I quote.

He laughs. "Hey, that's good. I'll have to remember that."

I had read various sniping reports in the media. That he was an archivist, insufficiently avant-garde. That he didn't hire enough white players or play enough music written by whites. That he was provincial. That he was insufficiently sensitive to multiculturalism (translation: not part of the current fad of "world music," whatever that is). Low-level cavils from the right and from the left, which had saddened me, since he is a musical genius, the leader of a powerful renaissance in jazz and a tireless educator of the young. Personally, he is charismatic, a lover of argument, a firm, not to say tenacious, defender of his opinions about music, politics, philosophy and everything else, very bright and mildly impatient -- all of which rubs some people the wrong way.

As both an artist and an observer of the musical scene, Marsalis is drawn to clarity. He abhors confusion. Unfortunately, a good deal of confusion continues to exist in the jazz world, partly because the old order is giving way to the new and partly because of the history of obscurantism, defensiveness and hermeticism that has prevailed for something like 50 years.

Jazz is a fine art, and the only fine art to have been developed from scratch in America, where recognition, paradoxically, has been slow in coming -- perhaps because the music emerged from black culture, from the bottom (economically speaking) up. Some protectiveness and secrecy on the part of the musicians was perhaps to be expected. Many black musicians were covetous, and some grew angry through the years as they saw white players making more money than themselves playing jazz or watered-down jazz. (It used to be said that jazz players were either black, Jewish, Italian or Irish -- very close to the truth -- and it was the blacks getting the short end of the stick from the union, the recording studios and the bookers.)

As well, jazz had an ominous side. Most players were honest, hard-working men, often subsidizing their music with ordinary jobs, known as "day gigs," but there were also drug addicts and dealers, thieves and pimps. A number of very famous players in the 1940's and 1950's ran strings of prostitutes to augment their incomes. Thus, there were people creating sublimely beautiful music while living sublimely ugly lives (strengthening the vulgar and false idea that the authenticity of the music was a function of the degree of misery in the life of the player). Public perception of jazz has been heavily tainted with notions of criminality and degeneracy, and lingers still, albeit faintly, despite the fact that conditions have changed completely.

There are jazz programs in virtually all the colleges and universities. Jazz clubs around the country are "high class" and expensive. Institutional efforts like Jazz at Lincoln Center (of which Marsalis is the artistic director, thus drawing heat from people who would like a different kind of programming) are springing up around the country. The new generation of players are, by and large, educated, cultured people in their 20's more likely to be vegetarians than drug addicts, more likely to run three miles a day than smoke cigarettes and more likely to be carrying an organ-donor card than a gun. There is a French expression, nostalgie de la boue, which means nostalgia for the gutter, and it is perhaps that preoccupation slowing down so many jazz fans, observers and writers from recognizing reality.

Jazz is American. It belongs to everybody now, black, white, Latin, to all those who have added to it and all those who have been moved by it. Fresh breezes are invigorating the music, which in turn promises to once again invigorate American culture itself. (And at this point, American culture needs all the good stuff it can get.) Heretofore, composers working from a European tradition have dipped in for a bit of spice and energy -- Ives, Copland, Gershwin and others who used jazzy effects -- but I believe the current renaissance will lead to a time when jazz is no longer marginalized, when artists working in jazz traditions will create work as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, those working from European traditions.

For a long time, jazz fans and players have been obsessed with the idea of "progress." Because of the speed and abruptness of the be-bop revolution, people were looking for something quick, and what they got, mostly, were garden paths leading to no place in particular. Progress is a dubious concept in any art -- have we had progress in poetry, in the novel, in painting or in dance? I don't think so.